Errors abound in the New Zealand internet as government flip-flops again

This one hasn’t happened for a while (over a year), and, the last time I blogged about it, I managed to solve the issue—after putting up with it for years prior to that. (The solution before December 2009 was to wait for the computer’s foul mood to pass—hardly scientific.)
   Unfortunately, this fix no longer works on Firefox 4. Deleting mimetypes.rdf does nothing and the error remains.
   Here’s the bug: when accessing Autocade, I got this message many times today on Firefox, Seamonkey and IE8. If I Tweet about it and ask others to head there, they don’t experience it, so, you might think it’s confined to me only. However, a search reveals that it happens to other people, but on other sites, and usually, only temporarily.

Autocade error message

   The error, which I’ll note here for the search engines, is that the PHP page is an ‘application/opensearchdescription+xml’ one and cannot be opened.
   The last few times I confronted it over the previous 12 months, I added www to the address (to get www.autocade.net) and I was fine again. This fix worked this afternoon, but it doesn’t work any more.
   I don’t think it’s the browser. If I use a proxy server, the page opens fine. I’ve tried this on two computers now, each with a different OS.
   Since it’s on our own dedicated server, I can assure you we haven’t made any changes our end, other than add content. Last time, I checked with our hosting provider and they can’t see anything wrong there.
   Which, in my mind, due to a process of elimination, leaves the ISP. They denied (last time I enquired, in 2009) that they were to blame.
   So no one admits it’s their problem. Any clues on whodunnit?

Incidentally, and maybe this is related since it’s all on the same server, I have had two New Zealand-based friends over the last few weeks say they cannot send emails to me any more. The emails all bounce back and they have had to resort to using the telephone. If it keeps up, I might suggest they buy a fax machine.
   Our server is based abroad, and I have to wonder if some of our ISPs no longer resolve DNSs properly any more. I’ve had the same email address since 1995 and we haven’t had reports from other countries having difficulty emailing us.
   Considering this government has now sneaked in a copyright legislation change under urgency (presumably to help American and foreign lobbyists), after PM John Key flip-flopped on the issue in 2009, very few things surprise me about the poor state of the internet here.
   The new law, which has likely passed by now, says a rights’ owner merely needs to allege an infringement for the accused to be automatically guilty. It is then up to that person to disprove guilt.
   If you find that my Twitter avatar has been blacked out, this is why.


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